Thoughts and Reflections from Vinnie Vrotny

Month: February 2007

I have been involved in two major projects, one professional and one personal which have eaten all of my time over the past week. I am the adviser to our school’s yearbook, the Mirror. Our final deadline to get this year’s edition to the plant in order to guarantee our spring delivery is today, February 28th. Most of my available time, during the school day, the evenings, and the weekend have been devoted to guiding our students through crunch time. It looks like we will have have 80% of the book in today, with the remaining 20% completed over the […]

I have settled into a routine over the past six to seven weeks, kind of a personal Professional Learning Tuesday, where I spend a significant amount of listening time over at EdTechTalk.com. I have a hectic morning with scheduled meetings and classes. I then try to settle in to listen to Alex Ragone (Learning Blog) and Arvind Grover (21 Apples) on their webcast, 21st Century Learning at 12:30 p.m. They have great guests and since they are also independent school educators, provide prospectives on issues that we are wrestling with daily. In the evening, I settle down to listen to […]

On Friday, February 16th, I was given the opportunity to present to our Lower School teachers. While brainstorming with our Lower School head, Pam Whalley, it was determined that I should focus this session on how to create Global Connections. If I may say, it was a wonderful presentation full of wonderful ideas which has already lead to fruitful conversations during lunch and electronically with teachers. With this posting, I am reviewing the material presented to the faculty so that the teachers in our Middle School and Upper School, as well as you, the blogosphere at large, can benefit from […]

One of the responsibilities, in addition to being the Director of Academic Technology, is being the lead advisor on our school’s yearbook, the Mirror. I love working with students to document and develop a journalistic approach to document and tell the story of the year’s events. Creating this “old fashioned” print record is an interesting juxtaposition to providing leadership in using emerging the new Web 2.0 methods of documenting and communicating. Each year, we pick a concept or a theme to use as a prism to view the year’s events. This year, we have selected the concept of community as […]

Richard Kassissieh (kassblog.com ) shared and interesting post about Global Ed and Technology. I agree with his assertions that the use of lower quality connections as being as valuable as higher tech solutions. One reason is that it is more easily accessible in other parts of the world. You are more likely to find someone in Africa who can download skype (for free) and connect than to expect them to be able to purchase a more costly solution. Jim Heynderickx, ( k12converge.com) commenting on Richard’s post, brings up a great concern of mine, which is finding partners outside of our […]